I'm setting up a small network using a few older machines that are running Mandrake 8.0. I configured each with their respective IP addresses to use in this network, but when I reboot or power off the machine, it loses any configuration that was done to eth0.

Any ideas or suggestions why this might be or what I could do to fix it?

Or is it just a case of old machines and there's nothing that can be done...

Just to make this a more complete reference for future searches, I checked on different linux systems to see how to manually set IP addresses... here is the result {I assumed a manual IP of 192.168.0.2 on a class "C" (255.255.255.0) subnet}: -------------------------------------------Joey's posted solution works for RedHat (I checked 8 and 9), Mandrake (I checked 8.0,9.1,9.2) and SUSE (I checked 8.2 and 9.0). Adjusted for IP address of 192.168.0.2 it looks like this: